The present invention relates to a food product tracing system that traces a food product such as a livestock product distributed from a producer such as a stockbreeder to an end supplier (a retailer, a processing supplier, a processing supplier), a food product tracing program to make a computer function as such a food product tracing system and a food product tracing method realized by such a system.
A domestic animal (a cow, a pig, a sheep, a cock, etc) bred by a stockbreeder is slaughtered and dismantled by a dismantling supplier and distributed by a distributor (a food company) to an end supplier (retail by a retailer, processing to a secondary product by a processing supplier). In this specification, a livestock product means not only a secondary product such as meat but also a domestic animal itself at an initial stage of the distribution.
In the distribution of a livestock product, it is important to keep safety of a product. However, a livestock product coming from a diseased livestock may be distributed on a distribution channel. Typical examples are prion disease of a domestic animal, which are mad cow disease (BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in a cow and scrapie disease in a sheep, and foot-and-mouth disease. While an infection route of prion disease is not completely elucidated, the strong opinion says that the prion disease infects by taking feed containing protein called abnormal prion. Further, since foot-and-mouth disease is a viral contagious disease, it infects through skin infection besides oral infection.
A livestock product infected with such a pathogen is not completely safe even if any treatment is applied. In particular, a livestock product coming from a domestic animal infected with prion disease should be taken out from a distribution channel to incinerate promptly because abnormal prion is hard to disintegrate by an usual heat treatment and mutual infection between Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease that infects with human and BSE is indicated.
In order to keep safety of a livestock product, a method to control distribution of livestock products by applying an ID number to every domestic animal is previously used. According to this method, the same ID number is applied to the livestock products coming from an individual of a certain domestic animal. Therefore, when a result of an infection test immediately after slaughter is officially announced, a supplier of each stage in a distribution channel of livestock products is able to know whether the products under his/her control are produced from the infected domestic animal or not.
However, since an inspector cannot trace the livestock products coming from the infected domestic animal by himself/herself according to the conventional control method, the inspector has to inform the ID number to suppliers in the distribution channel to urge them to report whether they have livestock products coming from the infected domestic animal or not. As described above, since the effectiveness of the conventional control method is highly dependent on conscience of each supplier, it was insufficient from the viewpoint of food safety security for consumers.